While I didn't quite see that mentioned in the articles, you'll almost certainly be giving them your account name (so necessarily your contact information), which combined with the data they have gets your full name (via G+) and approximate GPS coordinates, etc.

But in exchange they won't track you with your AP anymore (they'll just use your neightbor's, firend's, office's,...)

No, you can opt out of helping others be tracked with your AP. Whether you are tracked or not is a completely different issue.

Personally, I'd prefer if people did not opt out, because people can already opt out of the tracking on their own cellphones*, and opting out of this is bad for anyone who is voluntarily trying to get their location.

* tracking by the providers is impossible to disable on the cellphone, but this won't help with that either.

The service Google is talking about here tracks the physical location of Wifi hubs by SSID, and because of regulatory pressure they're letting the Wifi hub users opt out. But how are they going to do that? Let anybody fill out a web form saying "SSID '12345678' is mine" and opt out? (Or at least implement some minimal security by requiring you to also provide the street address, so they can validate that you know where that SSID is, though you could still forge an opt-out for your local Starbucks?)

One thing they don't talk about is whether they're tracking anything by IP address, or just by SSID. I'd really like to tell them not to track anything from my Wifi Access Point's IP address:-)

Hiding your ESSID is not a security feature, and can be found with a trivial amount of effort. all one would have to do is drop your WLAN card into monitor mode, and get near the AP, and wait for a beacon. Chances are Google collected this info in this exact manner, as it would be a bit difficult to drive down the road and log all ESSID's any other way. Now, with that said, hiding your ESSID only stops the AP from sending out broadcast beacons unless necessary. If there were little to no traffic on your net

You would think that, and you'd be sort of right. But this is basically a retroactive opt-out. Say your SSID was public and now you want it out of their database. I honestly cannot imagine why. There are literally 0 privacy implications here. It's pretty clear this was done just to shut up some European regulator who had no idea what the hell Google was actually doing but thought it *sounded* like something he should be concerned about.

There's no tracking. There is nothing resembling "tracking" going on here. That's pure inflammatory nonsense. Theodp posts trollish summaries whenever it comes to Google and he submits them constantly; sometimes they get posted as-is and the comments are generally full of people saying "Wtf?".

This is not about *tracking* and opt-in would be literally impossible because there's no way to tie an identity to a MAC address so Google wouldn't have any damn idea who to ask. Google has a database of Wifi route

The idea that this data is somehow private is the crazy part, people are broadcasting on free access public spectrum. It would be like giving people the option to opt out of having their house on street view. Its the general public's own misunderstanding that their WiFi signal is not limited to their own private space that is the real issue.

Just think if this was using a different method, where a phone user can snap a picture of a public road and google would given them their location based off street view

The idea that this data is somehow private is the crazy part, people are broadcasting on free access public spectrum. It would be like giving people the option to opt out of having their house on street view.

People leave their curtains open. That doesn't mean they expect someone to set up a webcam outside their house so anyone can watch what they're doing.

Right. I agree with this sentiment. There was, within the last year or so, a case involving a man who was naked in his home, but a side window was open. A girl and her grandmother walking past HIS house, on his property, using the side of the house as a sort of short cut, saw him and called the police. who did arrest him on public nudity charges. Charge were later reversed. Such is the society we live in.

Are you trying to be funny? There was a huge outrage over street view in Germany and you do, in fact, have the ability to opt out of having your house on Street View. I've got a blurred house across from where I live.

Being visible/receivable from the street is one thing, having that data recorded and redistributed on a mass -- almost exhaustive -- scale is something different.

All that said, I don't really get the outrage over recording hash(BSSID) to location mappings. The hash of a BSSID can not be tied to

Being visible/receivable from the street is one thing, having that data recorded and redistributed on a mass -- almost exhaustive -- scale is something different.

Certainly Americans don't see it that way, but I recall reading that the Japanese feel that things which occur in public still have some privacy because politeness dictates that people not stare/spy/etc. So, for instance, changing your clothes in front of an open window still, somehow, qualifies as private and when a streetview car drives by that suddenly puts it in the public because people viewing those pictures later will not feel the social pressure to politely look away.

My point was not so much that Street View itself is an issue, but that while recording public things may be unproblematic on a small scale, they may become problematic if technology enables us to do them on a large, ubiquitary scale.

I'm not creeped out by Street View, I think it's pretty cool and -- as with BSSID collection -- the potential for abuse is very low. The outrage was really caused by an only vaguely informed public and fueled by politicians who were happy to finally have someone besides themselv

What bothers me is that this isn't really that important. Who cares if they know where the access point is? It's just another AP. Sure you can tie it to a location, but what's the matter with that? The only information being associated is a GPS coordinate and an (internal!) MAC address and maybe an SSID. Big deal. You know there's an AP at these coordinates, but you could probably have guessed that buy looking them up and seeing there's a house there. So now they know for sure (within a few houses) a

To be tracked, you need to have an application running on your cellphone/laptop doing the Wifi scanning and sending the results to their servers. Why don't you just disable it? More: at least on laptops, why did you install it in the first place?

Cellphone tracking by AP or even GPS is a red herring anyway. You're always tracked by the cellphone towers.

The service Google is talking about here tracks the physical location of Wifi hubs by SSID, and because of regulatory pressure they're letting the Wifi hub users opt out.

If only IEEE 802.XX [ietf.org] devices like wifi access points had some sort of address [wikipedia.org] that was guaranteed to be unique to that particular physical device. You could then even print that address on some sort of physical sticker and affix it to the device so that the owner could discover that address and communicate to third parties.

If Street View is anything to go by there wont be any security. You can get anything removed from Street View just by claiming you live somewhere in the image and supplying an email address. The place I used to work at removed all their competitors' shops that way.

Don't talk crap. Mobile location can be extremely useful. You go to google, search for something, like skateboard, or restaurant, and you'll get the nearest offerings come up, on a map, with the option to navigate from your current location.

When you grow up and leave home, have kids etc, you may discover there's a real world where the rest of the population lives.

Don't talk crap. Mobile location can be extremely useful. You go to google, search for something, like skateboard, or restaurant, and you'll get the nearest offerings come up, on a map, with the option to navigate from your current location.

What if I'm not looking for the nearest location?

And what do I do when Google's idea of my location is not even in the same country, let alone the same town? When I was in Italy a couple of years ago Google was convinced that I was in Holland. Of course having the website come up in Dutch wasn't much worse than having it come up in Italian because I don't speak either language, so the 'user-friendly' location tracking was actively harmful either way.

So how does this relate to my post? I never mentioned location. I get that the main article is about location but the bottom line is Google has a long history of doing things of questionable legality until they are told not to. Just because they can figure out where you are doesn't mean they should until you opt-in. They are doing it both to make their service better but also because context specific ads pay better. Google will do anything they can to get more info about you so that your conversion rate wil

You pretty much named the only questionable thing I can think of, and even it, they were on the "good guys" side of it from most people perspective. Allowing people to search through books might be on legally shaky ground, but it was hardly an act of evil.

Um, continuing to scan books while it is publicly well known that the rights holders are seeking an injunction or whatever it is called I'd say is pretty evil. Might not be illegal but in my mind scanning and publishing a bunch of copyright material in industrial volumes without permission from all the right-holders (actually even after it was publicly known that one of the right-holder groups was pursuing legal means to stop you) is pretty shady. I think books are worse to copy and distribute freely than m

Google mapped SSIDs as a side project of driving their StreetView camera cars everywhere. If that had been all they'd done, they probably wouldn't have been bothered by the government, but as was widely reported, they also recorded a lot of actual Wifi user traffic at the same time, in addition to the SSIDs themselves. That really annoyed a lot of people, leading to government investigations into Google's data collection.

So this was a project that was well-known for not foreseeing really obvious stuff:-)

Because its not the government's job to enact laws by caveat. If it did we'd have a real problem on our hands. Laws are introduced as bills by citizens. The local (state, county, whatever) legislature then votes on those bills and they become laws. Didn't you people ever see School House Rock?

..that this has to happen at the behest of a government agency. Why didn't google just foresee this was going to happen and implement it originally?

Because nothing else involving public broadcasts of personal information works this way in the USA. For example, I'd like to opt out of ANPR - automatic license plate reading systems but I don't have that option short of not using my car (same as not using wifi).

Because its hysterical nonsense. There's no privacy issue here whatsoever. Even the summary calls it "tracking", which just shows the submitter has no idea whats going on here. It's not tracking. All their doing is paying attention to their location when a router announces its presence. So theoretically, somebody might be able to figure out if your address has a wifi router or not. Is that a privacy issue for you?

Because if so, you can turn that announcement off and stay "private". You don't actuall

It's our service shouldn't we be opting in rather than out? Opting out would somehow imply that it is their right to do this? Didn't they get in trouble once already for scraping people's wifi for their own gain?

They have forgotten to ask if it is right. Does that make them evil, or just lazy?

Is it still evil if they ultimately use this information to create mesh wifi networks that support voip via Android handsets?

To be quite honest, I'm surprised Google hasn't already entered the wifi router market. All they need to do is re-brand a router, add in some QoS stuff for Android handsets, and package a SIP app in Android and you have just given the masses *free cell phone service.

I would be shitting my pants right now if I were a major telco executive. This is the meat and potatoes of the net-neu

Information collecting companies love opt-out - they know that the vast majority of their contributors won't bother. Google isn't the only one - every financial company I deal with sends me "You can opt out of us sharing your information" brochures, safe in the knowledge that I won't bother calling the toll-free number and punching in my account ID. They encourage this by making it hard to tell whether you've opted out previously or not.

But Google is pretty good about opt-in compared to companies like Facebook. This particular issue, however, is not a privacy one. Some regulatory drone simply has no idea what Google is doing but doesn't like the sound of it so they demanded an opt-out. An opt-in would be *literally* impossible because MAC addresses are naturally anonymous. There's no way to take one and track it back to its owner by name. As such, there's no way to contact people and ask for permission--nor is there any need to since

Imagine if you had a giant neon sign on top of your roof with your SSID on it, available for everyone within a quarter mile to see... and you got pissed when someone started keep track of the location of all of those neon signs. Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't make something public if you want it to be private.

The WiFi spec doesn't require broadcasting your SSID. If you want it to be private, don't shout it out; stop shouting your SSID to the world, and disable SSID broadcast in your router settings.

If you are going to install a radio in your house, that sprays data in every direction, then you have no right to privacy.

You want security? Encrypt your network. That will keep all your data private.

If you don't even want anyone to know whether or not there is a wifi network in your house, then too bad! That's like saying you don't want anyone to know you have a chainsaw, when you've got it running 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Anyone nearby is going to know you've got one, and they have every right to t

Your router is not your phone. You don't take it everywhere you go, so Google isn't tracking YOU when they record this. Moreover, your router's MAC address is not personally identifiable. They have no way to say look at that address and put a name to it.

That announcement packet is not just on the public airwaves, it by design, is EXPLICITLY intended for the public. Everyone in

It's because it's Europe. For whatever reason, Europeans trust government and distrust corporations. The bigger one is, the obviously less trustworthy it becomes. Google is huge, so clearly must be very, very evil.

You're confused. I'm too tired to give you the long explanation. Suffice to say, there was harmless stuff they were collecting on purpose when they ACCIDENTALLY collected stuff that might actually be private along with it. This is not about the accidental stuff.

This is about the stuff they were collecting on purpose which is, as I said, completely harmless. There are literally 0 privacy implications to having this data collected. It does not track back to you, it's already completely public, and at the

I'm all about privacy -- I always turn off every checkbox about "anonymous results will be submitted," etc., etc., but even I know my router's SSID is public. I don't care what happens to those on the outside of my network.:\

Most people don't understand how SSID broadcasting, network security, and encryption work, and also don't know that if they have an open network, not only are they sharing their bandwidth, but much of their data as well.

Bingo. It is the collection of your router's unique wireless MAC address and publishing the MAC address along with its geographic coordinates that is the real problem. When people wake up to the issue, Google is going to have a major problem.

You can hide your router's SSID, you can turn on encryption, you can change the default password, but you can't hide your router's wireless MAC address. If you could, it would not be possible for even you to connect to your own wireless router.

Q. "But doesn't this information identify people?"A. "SSIDs are often just the name of the router manufacturer or ISP with numbers and letters added, though some people do also personalize them."--Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel [blogspot.com] (4-27-2010)

"What is the SSID for Google WiFi?The SSID for the Google WiFi service in Mountain View is GoogleWiFi (case-sensitive).T

When you enable network location services, do you even know what networks it uses to get your location?

This is about fixed wireless AP's, not your phone, or anything that actually gets the location.

Its about whether or not they can use your public wifi AP as a means of calculating someone's location. I'm pretty sure that someone wouldn't have any idea that the service was using your wifi signal strength, and they certainly wouldn't be able to identify you.

How? Figuring out whether someone has Wifi in their house is a big turn on for stalkers? That's all anyone can do with this information. Unless people are carrying their Wifi routers around with them in their purse/briefcase all day long (while somehow keeping them plugged in) there's no way this equates to tracking. At WORST is merely reveals which addresses own wifi network

I moved a few months ago, and now whenever my phone can see my AP but not get GPS, it puts me in the wrong place. I don't mind having my SSID/MAC in the database, but I'd like to be able to update it with the current location.

Aha, that's it. I moved from the UK to Finland and took my AP with me; ever since I've got here, one of my apps has insisted on putting me at my UK address. I only ever use it at home, under two concrete floors... must try it somewhere else and see what it does.

Now I get it! I was so confused about why, when at my new condo, my phone often thinks I'm near my old house. WTF, Google. There needs to be some more rapid means of updating this. It's been almost a year.

The more interesting part of this - is how Google found out the location of your wifi access point in the first place?

Your wifi router does not have GPS - only an internet connection (likely).

I think it relies on the Google cars driving around and collecting this info - that's about the only reliable way to do it - so the delay could be because their street view cars haven't been past your new location since you moved...

Unless they use more cars, or find a better way to update this stuff, I can see it getti

Unless they use more cars, or find a better way to update this stuff, I can see it getting very jumbled and inaccurate.

The snail mail databases that are sold and resold and sold again are so old that they are useless. I'm still receiving junk mail addressed to someone who doesn't live here for 10 years. Executives that sell and buy those lists don't care how bad they are since there is no feedback. A list with 10 million addresses is better than a list with 5 million addresses, even though 90% of entries

They can't notify you because even if they have your MAC address in their database they have NO WAY of knowing its yours. All they know is what locations have wifi networks, not which people have wifi networks. Which is why this isn't tracking. Which is why this isn't a big deal. Which is why this whole thing is dumb.

And anyways, why would you want to opt-out? Do you have some weird thing about people potentially figuring out that you have a wifi network in your house from a distance? How does this put